The Riddle That Is Blair

May 15th, 2007

The Washington Post/Slate

He has been called everything from an “inferior Bill Clinton” to “as divisive a figure as Thatcher.” His record in the Middle East has been described as one of “catastrophic failure,” and his mistakes have been attributed to “stupendous moral vanity.” He has been called a success, a failure, lucky, unfortunate: “Blair: A Modern Tragedy” is the title of the Spectator magazine’s special 36-page end-of-Blair supplement. Yet during the onslaught of political obituaries that have appeared in Britain since his long-awaited resignation speech last week, “You wait, you’ll be sorry when they’re gone” was a sentiment quite frequently expressed about Blair and his wife, Cherie, too.

And that was just the British press: the French, the Germans and pretty much everyone else have also spent the past few days puzzling over his legacy. Partly this is because it affects all of them: If nothing else, his transformation of the British Labor Party from a bunch of unelectable semi-Marxists into the slickest political force in Europe has not gone unnoticed by would-be imitators. Partly this is because the goodwill engendered by Blair’s economic success contrasts so sharply with the ill will inspired by his decision to fight in Iraq. Indeed, Blair — the “mendacious, spin-obsessed, manipulating fraudster who lied to take us to war,” as one recent caricature put it, inspires stunning outpourings of hatred, particularly from members of his own party.

Still, I am convinced that the real reason people in Britain and elsewhere can’t stop talking about Blair has nothing to do with politics at all. The problem is deeper: Fundamentally, the man’s character is a riddle. On the one hand, he frequently describes himself as a true conviction politician, a man who sticks to his guns whatever the opinion polls say. Certainly that’s how he explains Iraq. “I decided we should stand shoulder to shoulder with our oldest ally,” he stated in his resignation speech:

“Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That’s your call. But believe one thing if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country.”

Yet, at the same time, Blair is perhaps the most outstanding contemporary example of the politician who wants to be loved and who tries at all times to be all things to all people. He speaks the language of the left when he is talking to his own party, dwells on free markets when he addresses business executives and, at least for the first few years of his term, appeared to believe that getting everyone to agree with him about everything was only a matter of time.

During an interview in 2001, he explained this belief to me like this: “If I could get out and explain to people what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, basically they’d support it.”

But since he couldn’t always “get out and explain to people what we’re doing,” he invented the British version of the modern media machine. Though “spin” wasn’t unheard of in pre-Blair Britain, it is fair to say that he perfected the arts of the well-aimed leak, the removal of fingerprints from the evidence, the careful timing of bad news. On the very day of his resignation speech, the British government quietly revealed that one of Blair’s pet programs was going to cost far more than anticipated — presumably because no one would write about a such a lowly subject on that day of bigger news.

Indeed, his fiercest critics claim that even the decision to invade Iraq is not evidence that Blair “did what I thought was right.” On the contrary, they say: He invaded Iraq because he thought it was going to be popular.

Blair’s departure thus leaves unresolved this weird dilemma: Is he deeply moral, a man of conviction? Is he deeply cynical, a man who governs by spin? Or does he use spin to make himself look like a man of conviction? According to one recent poll, some 28 percent of Britons think that Blair “genuinely believes that all of his statements and actions are morally right,” which is actually a pretty high number. Yet 51 percent think that “he manages to convince himself that whatever he has decided to do must be morally right,” a statement that, if you think about it, implies that more than half of Britons believe Blair has a loose grip on reality.

Not Iraq, not the health-care system, not the economy, not peace in Northern Ireland, but this — the gap between Blair’s high-minded language and the often grubby reality — is above all what will occupy Blair’s future biographers, just as it has occupied his contemporaries. Not because the question has political implications any more, but because it is a genuine mystery.